Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Build Discussion YOU DON'T NEED HIGH CHARISMA!

Is it really ugly if you get expertise at all social skills? Those black lines must turn people on a lot.

Yeah, no. I'd rather have my bard, thank you very much.

Charisma is not about just how you look, but how you present and the way people react to you. Imagine the fat, dumpy old Dwarven Bard. He is an excellent story teller, talent musician, easy going, loves a good drink or a good bar fight. he walks into a bar and people love him. He might not be pretty but his presence is enough for people to find joy, THAT is a high Charisma.

You don't need a high charisma in bg3, but it sure does help.

From an RP perspective it makes sense that you have one Charismatic person in the group, that is the glue that holds the group together. From a game mechanics perspective your right there is no need.

However from a mechanics point of view you also do not need a Rogue as anyone can pick locks and remove traps. The specialty of some of the classes and characteristics has been nerfed out of a lot of RPGs.

I've not read every post in this thread but having tried the game with a low Charisma character and a high charisma character with a persuasion proficiency the latter is much more fun. Yes you can fight the big bads but it's so much more fun And with the Orin quest -

You can always get one of the spellcasters (Bard, Cleric, Druid and Wizard should get it, maybe more) and cast Enhance Ability: Charisma to get a lot of Charisma checks.

For example my Cha 8 Half-Orc Champion got the Musical Instrument ability rather easily on first try (it also helped that Astarion was changed to Bard and I used up two Bardic Inspirations).

I just did the Orin quest with my broague and ended up using invisibility + lockpicking instead of a charisma skill.

The real question in my opinion is: what are the *worst* ability scores for *everyone * in your party to have dumped?

#1 - Con. Your casters won’t maintain concentration, your martials won’t stay up for long, you’ll spend a ton of resources on healing, which means fights will drag on, and the more they drag on the more your weaknesses will be accentuated.

#2 - Cha. You’ll pay the price for it, literally and figuratively. You’ll have fewer options for how to resolve situations, higher shop prices, and this means you didn’t bring a bard, pally, sorc or Warlock, or at least not a very good one, and those are all very good classes.

#3 - Wis. You’ll literally just miss things as this is the skill set for perception and survival, and Cleric, Druid, Ranger and Monk are all quite good as well.

#4 - Int. Having *someone* who can make those Religion checks etc is handy, Int covers a lot of skills, and you don’t get a do over in most situations in BG3, so again you just have fewer options and less lore you’ll experience.

#5 - Dex. Having high Dex is nice, but based on how Stealth works it’s not strictly necessary, and advantage matters a lot more than a flat bonus. It’s also easy to anticipate situations where Dex is needed. In general you’ll be low in initiative but that’s hardly as damning as a low Con and a well executed ambush can make up for it.

#6 - Str. “Send to Camp” makes carry capacity irrelevant, Fly and similar abilities make jump capabilities irrelevant, and there are *Lots* of other options for damage. If I had to make a party where no one had a high score in one ability, it would definitely be Str.

So yeah, terrible Cha all around wouldn’t be the *worst* thing, but it’s close. More importantly, why would you want to? Surely *someone* can afford to have a decent Cha, even if it’s their secondary or tertiary score.

Err ... I dont think you can rate Ability Scores like that. For different classes, different abilities have different values. Also even for the same class, you can build them differently, or on Clerics it depends if you build for Medium or for Heavy Armor, etc.

Charisma specifically is really only useful for Paladin, Bard, Sorcerer, and Warlock. In fact many Paladins will forgo maximizing their Charisma, since there are so many desireable feats to have, so its down to Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock. Everyone else only "needs" Charisma for the associated skills, and absolutely nothing else.

Shop prices: You can literally optimize one character for that and never use them, unless you want to go shopping. You want a Bard with Charisma 18+, Level 5+, and Persuation Expertise, and lower Difficulty to Explorer before talking to the merchant with said Bard. This gives you best possible prices even at merchant Attitude 0 (default) already. Only Rogue and Bard can get Expertise for Persuade, and only Bard has any reason to maximize their Charisma, so its kind of a nobrainer to pick Bard instead of Rogue for this. Though a Rogue with Charisma 14+, Level 9+ and Persuation Expertise would of course do just as well.

Constitution: This is where I agree, I give everyone at least Con 12. I think for Paladins I have considered Con 10 because I really like giving them high Wisdom, I avoid their concentration spells like the plague anyway, and they still get plenty of hitpoints even at Con 10.

Dexterity vs Strength: when I hand optimize my characters, I either go for Strength 16+ and Dexterity 10 for Heavy Armor users, Dexterity 14 for Medium Armor users, and of course Strenght 8 or 9 and Dexterity high for everyone else, especially Rogues and possibly also Rangers with Dexterity 17+. Either way both have a TON of advantages. Strength is needed for most (non-Finesse) melee weapons, and for thrown weapons, which includes the returning ones, and of course for the Tavern Brawler feat. It also gives jump distance, which means you can move over difficult terrain and can move much larger distances in battle. Dexterity of course gives you initiative, which is migthy important. If you beat the opponents initiative, you may even manage to kill them without them ever getting a move in the first place.

Stealth: Really in the end you want a Rogue level 10+ so you get a minimum skill roll of 10, which is then highly reliable. Other than that, stuff like Invisibility might work.

Etc etc etc one could really look at a lot of aspects. A general scoring makes no sense.

What I mean is, let’s say you have a party where everyone sucks at Dex. A Barb, Sorc, Cleric and Wizard, where none of them prioritize Dex at all. What are you missing? Stealing, some scouting (in areas where you *must* cross LOS), lock picking, that’s about it. You can have a max Dex Rogue chilling in your encampment (or if 4 human players have someone respec to that), do your scouting or stealing or lock picking, swap them back out. No worries.

What about Int or Wis? Well, if it’s a check on a statue or something, you might be able to swap someone in, but a) if they fail that’s that, no retries, and b) a larger portion of those checks are within dialogue, and often you can’t go back. So unless you know ahead of time that you’ll need the check to swap them in, you either miss a lot of them or swap them in before every conversation, which is terrible.

Charisma is like that, but far worse. Yes you can have a charisma specialist hang out in camp and pull them out for vendors, but that won’t help with your limitations in dialogue unless you’re pulling them out for *every conversation *, Cha based dialogue checks are all over the place, and if you’re doing so, it would typically be a lot better and easier if you just had them as a permanent part of your party.

Str on the other hand? If you’ve got a Sorc, Rogue, Cleric, and Dex based Monk, sure your party isn’t optimal, Tavern Brawler is great among other things. But if you did have such a party, and had your strength specialist chilling in camp, when would you pull them out? What situation would require their skills, which couldn’t be handled without them? I’d argue basically never. But while the primary strength of higher strength is more damage, you can get that from anywhere. Other than Con I guess, but Int, Wis, Dex and Cha can all drive your damage and do just fine at it. Plus there’s options aplenty for temporarily boosting your Str if you really needed to, way more than say for Wis or Cha. So if I were to build a full party with a glaring weakness across the board, I’d have that weakness be Strength long before I had it be Cha.

You forgot the other biggie: potions of hill giant strength. A bit of gold fixes your strength problem for a character or two easy. That's what would make strength a very strong candidate from a min/max standpoint.

Int would be the other strong contender. Unless you're playing a wizzy, you're most likely just going from a +1 to a -1 stat bonus at most. And it is quite likely, that at some point in chapter 1, suddenly, somehow, one character suddenly has a +3 bonus instead.

Well, if you have the equipment slot for it, anyway.

I went for it on my Bard for obvious reasons (since he's supposed to be a master at all speech checks), but otherwise I only use it temporarily.

And even on my Bard I lose this slot for other interesting equipment, including